I was reading some blogs this morning and came across the whole "World will end in 2012" thing. The claim is that NASA says that the poles will shift in 2012 but true to form for this type of article, there is no citation given. I did a Google search of NASA.gov and could not find any predictions of pole shifting in 2012. However, I did find a couple of very helpful FAQs.

The Earth's magnetic field does not disappear during pole reversals; it becomes multimodal (it has multiple poles). It also is not getting weaker since the field energy is the same. It is just distributed differently. When you hear of the Earth's magnetic field becoming weaker, this only applies to the big dipole field we use to align our compasses. The other poles become stronger. Don't believe the doomsayers that say the Earth's magnetic field is going away entirely. It is not so. If the Earth has no magnetosphere there is nothing to protect it from being sterilized by solar radiation and having our atmosphere literally blown away. This is the problem that Mars has and why terraforming it is so problematic.

The idea that the world will end in 2012 is about as accurate as any prediction of world-ending disaster. Remember the doom predicted by the Y2K bug doomsayers where computer clocks wouldn't roll over correctly? Non-event. What about the coming Ice Age that was popular back in the mid 70's? Now it is Global Warming. How about the big planetary alignment called The Jupiter Effect to take place in 1983? Nothing.